Fmr. Head of DC National Guard to Jan. 6 Committee: Our Response Would’ve Been ‘Vastly Different’ if the Rioters Were Black

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File

The head of the District of Columbia National Guard told the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that he believed the law enforcement response would have been “vastly different” if the majority of the rioters had been Black, a newly-released transcript revealed.

Gen. William J. Walker currently serves as the House Sergeant at Arms and was the Commanding General of the D.C. National Guard at the time of the attack. On April 21, 2022, he gave a sworn deposition to the committee, as reported by NBC News’ Ryan Reilly. That transcript, released Tuesday, was among a long list of documents that the committee has released this month as it wrapped up its investigation and report in advance of the Republicans taking control of the House when the next Congress is sworn into office in January.

Walker, who is the first Black House Sergeant at Arms, shared his speculation that the law enforcement officers at the Capitol would have responded in a much harsher and more violent manner if the rioters had been Black, and not majority White.

He was asked by one of the committee staffers about “why there may have been a reluctance” for the Guard to deploy to the Capitol, as compared to the response during the George Floyd protests around the country in the summer of 2020. “Some people talk about…[t]he politics, the composition, racial composition of the protesters,” the staffer asked Walker for his “theory.”

“So I’m African American. Child of the Sixties. I think it would have been a vastly different response if those were African Americans trying to breach the Capitol,” Walker replied. “As a career law enforcement officer, part-time soldier, last 5 years full but, but a law enforcement officer my entire career, the law enforcement response would have been different.”

Walker went so far as to say that he believed that more rioters would have been killed by law enforcement officers if the crowd had not been mostly White. He recalled his own experiences being stopped by police for “driving a high-value government vehicle” for “no other reason” than his race and how he has had to have “the talk” with his children and grandchildren about “what to do to survive an encounter with the police.”

“So I think it would have been a different — as a human being, as an African American, I think it would have been a different response by law enforcement on January 6th,” Walker said. “And I’ll let you fill that in, but I just know it would have been a different response. I know that from experience.”

“I think the response would have been different, a lot more heavy-handed,” Walker continued.”You know, as a law enforcement officer, there were — I saw enough to where I would have probably been using deadly force.”

He gave the example of rioters who assaulted law enforcement officers and tried to take their weapons, noting that he almost always had two when he was an active officer.  “I think it would have been more bloodshed if the composition would have been different.”

Walker added that he did not think that race was part of the “military’s decision paralysis” regarding whether or not to send in the National Guard to the Capitol, just that race would have factored into a different physical response and the reluctance was more related to not liking “the way it looked” to have military members in uniform responding to a protest related to an election.

Read the full transcript of Walker’s deposition here (as redacted by the committee).